Installing SSL certs for Shared Hosting on Namecheap

I’m by no means a web developer at all. But like most programmers, I maintain a personal website. I like to use https for my webpages so I’m going to be going over how I go about installing ssl certs on my website. This is mostly for personal reference, but hopefully it can be useful to others in a similar position. The process is a little less straightforward on namecheap than other hosting providers, if you use another provider I would highly suggest using letsencrypt. Anyways, lets get into it.

Step 1: Acquire Certs

Head over to sslforfree and make an account. I use them because well they’re free and the process is pretty streamlined. Once you make an account, just follow the steps on screen. Note that wildcard domains are a premium feature, so you’ll have to make separate certificates for each subdomain (you can do up to 3 subdomains per account for free). You’ll have to verify each domain in order to generate the certificate, I like to use the HTTP file upload because its the most straightforward. Just download the file, scp it to your webpage server and you’re good.

Step 2: Download & Install

Once you verify the domain, go ahead and download the certificate and unzip it. Head over to your cPanel and navigate to the SSL/TLS section, click on “Generate, view, upload, or delete SSL certificates .” Click on choose file under “Upload a New Certificate” and upload your certificate.crt. Then click install next to the domain name at the top of the page, it’ll ask you for a private key which is the text contained in the private.key in the same zip file as the cert. Once you’ve installed the certificate, it may take a few minutes to activate.

Note: with the free tier of sslforfree, you’ll have to repeat this process every 90 days. Its kind of tedious and there’s probably a better way to do it, but this method is free and it works.